Saiga is a shotgun designed from the AK platform. You can't get more reliable than that right?
If anyone has any experience with the reliability and ruggedness of either shotgun, please share.
You'd think it would be just as reliable, but it isn't always. I've said my piece about my S12 before, but I'll give a bit more detail here. Here's my view of the weaknesses of the design:
1) Gas ports. This is more a failure of factory assembly quality. Ideally, there are 4 gas ports from the barrel into the gas tube. Usually there are three (like mine), and you'll be ok. Sometimes, there's two, one, or none. That's a problem. I wouldn't buy one I couldn't look over first, but maybe Arsenal will take a more active role in examining them once they're imported. You want at least 3 ports; two or one and it might not cycle light loads.
2) Feeding. Mine has a tendency to put a round nose-up into the top of the chamber on occasion. It isn't common, but neither is it rare. It's enough to give me pause before relying on it when reliability is a real need. It appears that this is not uncommon with the design, but neither is it a given. Kind of a YMMV kind of thing.
3) Conversion parts. I switched mine over to the pistol grip/AK stock configuration by moving the trigger group forward. it's an easy swap to do, but on my G2 trigger group there was a bit of a mold part line on the hammer that caused it to not reset after release. Some Dremel work fixed this. It isn't a concern in the stock config, and it isn't a hard fix, I'm just saying it so if you do the same conversion, you'll know to check that.
4) Sights. The S12 has rifle type sights. That's fine for slugs, but a real pain if you decide to use yours for things like waterfowl or clay games. Do-able, but they do get in the way.
5) Magazines. They need to be fit to the gun, usually by sanding down the top of the hump on the back of the mag so it will lock into place- compare the stock mag to new ones just so you know what you're doing. Easy enough, but it's a lesser known item for new owners.
6) Break-in. Reports are that they like to be broken in with a hundred or so heavy loads- as in full power slugs. I haven't done this with mine, so this could be an issue, but I do have a couple or three hundred target loads through it (not light target, I mean full power birdshot loads).
They're fun, but based on my experiences, I don't know that I'd grab one or recommend one for those who are really wanting reliability. They can be very reliable, but they can also be so-so.
